Meet the polar trailblazer joining Cunard in Alaska

How did you become a polar explorer?

After graduating from university, I joined a small film financing company and while I was there, I met a polar explorer. Well, a friend of mine was dating him… And I just thought, if he can do it, so can I. He helped put together the first women’s relay expedition to the North Pole, in 1997, which I led.  

How was that first expedition to the North Pole?

We held selection weekends on Dartmoor. Women didn’t do anything like these expeditions in the nineties. We knew people were thinking “they won’t do it, they haven’t got big hairy beards”. That was definitely part of the appeal – pushing those boundaries. We had five teams of four women, and I found the isolation and self-sufficiency utterly compelling. It was a very extreme form of backpacking, in an overwhelmingly beautiful environment, which was unlike anything I’d seen before.

Then you switched to the South Pole...

Five of us from that relay expedition got together and said “we want to do this again”. We’d caught the bug. We want to do it ourselves, without guides, and go all the way. I’d been very involved in the organisation of the first one, which was helpful. Antarctica was wonderful. It was very different to the Arctic, where you are travelling on frozen sea and frequently come across patches of open water. You smell the open water long before you see it. In Antarctica you are trekking over glaciers, 9,000ft thick. We walked for 60 days in extreme cold. The wind cuts straight through you. There were days when the conditions were pretty hellish, but still I enjoyed it.

... and returned to the North Pole

For three out of the five of us who went to Antarctica, the north felt like unfinished business. We needed to go all the way to the North Pole and do it for ourselves. We set out to do it unsupported, without a plane to resupply us, which few adventurers manage to do. And neither did we… we endured the most appalling conditions. If this had been that first relay expedition, we wouldn’t have got anywhere. This third expedition pulled on all the experience we’d had previously.

Why were conditions so bad there?

Spring temperatures average -35C but we experienced between -40C and -45C. When the cold is that extreme, it slows down your thought processes, it physically slows you down – and we had heavy sledges packed with food supplies and fuel. The tundra freezes over winter but in spring, it breaks up, and pressure ridges form. It’s like an assault course with 20-30ft high boulders of ice. At the beginning we covered no more than a mile a day and we had 500 to go! Five weeks in, we survived a terrible storm. We were unable to get the tent up, so we wrapped ourselves in the fabric, and lay on top of each other, to ride out the storm. The snow buried us alive, and we lay there for 50 hours.